221–230 of 692 posts
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thank you :-) i think that is the point of the article .. we are in a chicken and egg situation here .. no one believes women when they say there are problems and hence there is no progress ..
> no one believes women when they say there are problems and hence there is no progress .. There are huge public awareness campaigns around all of these issues.
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For someone trying to define how harassment should be dealt with, you're certainly keen on dismissively calling women "girls".
I'm not sure I agree. I often call people quite my junior 'boys' and 'girls'. I work with a startup of dudes under 24. I call them 'lads'. I could technically be their father. Is that wrong? No. Neither is using the term Mrs. Ms. or Miss.. In far-left socialist Montreal, where women are not even allowed by law to take their husband's name - people use the French equivalent everywhere: 'Madame' and 'Mademoiselle'. Sam…
Complaining about identity politics is how white men practice identity politics. Your post here is a shot fired in a culture war. You can't do that and complain about culture wars.
The phenomenon you're exploiting here is that the status quo is seen as the default state of the system. When women talk about bias, it's easy to say, "Why are women always talking about bias? Why are they starting a culture war?"
The start of the war, though, is lost in prehistory. For millennia, women were basically property, traded among families and owned by men. In the last couple hundred years, we've been unwinding that. We're not done yet, though. E.g., in the US we only hit parity in the number of medical and law degrees circa 2005; we won't see parity in the number of doctors and lawyers for decades more.
Women didn't start the war. They, and a growing number of men, are the resistance. Hopefully we will end the war within decades. But please don't pretend that shouting, "Stop fighting back!" is equivalent to a call for peace.
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Unionization is not banned in any state. Your link does not agree with your dishonest comment. Right to work laws simply prohibit collusion between unions and employers to prevent non-union workers from working. They are no different than other worker protection laws, e.g. the laws prohibiting Apple and Microsoft from forming an anti-poaching agreement.
Except that this law makes the union pointless. Laws like that are a prime reason unions are dying. Why pay union dues when you get all the benefits for free? Oh sure, the union shrivels and dies and the benefits leave with it, but fuck it you saved $25 off a few paychecks.
> No one at the company took responsibility for anything other than protecting the company’s liability in case of a lawsuit The tech industry absolutely doesn't need unions /s
I have seen harassment go south for the harasser, but the cases had one thing in common: The person that was being harassed had far more status than the harassers believed, so, in practice, they were spitting upwards. If high management believes you are the more valuable, likable party, you will win. If they don't, you will lose. Facts are relatively unimportant.
So the moral of the story is to make friends in high places. Depressing, but real.
If I was back at the start of my career, I would of dismissed this article and told the author to "toughen up". After all, what's a bit of ribbing among co-workers? Surely she's just being overly-sensitive. Until I had the (mis)pleasure of working with a truly toxic co-worker did my mindset completely change on the issue of bullying, intimidation, and hostility in the workplace. He was a senior guy, decent at his job…
If the worst you've seen at work is friendly teasing and maybe some racy language, it's easy to assume that's what happened and someone is overreacting.
If you've seen someone truly corrosive, that assumption changes. There's a world of difference between teasing and toxicity, even if the person doing it is careful enough to use language that could fall into either category. I can only imagine the frustration of writing down someone's comments and thinking "that doesn't look so bad on paper" when context made it clear (often to everyone present) that the exchange was terrible.
And on a related note, I think companies that handle these things poorly have misunderstood their incentives. Yes, avoiding lawsuits is important to them, and yes, I can even see why they wouldn't admit there was a problem. But to not take action is terrible - as your story indicates, a sufficiently toxic employee can destroy the functioning of an entire team. Burying an incident may be easy, but it's not a good business choice when you're going to lose good, valuable staff over the issue.
(I believe The Dilbert Principle suggested this was the single most important thing a manager could do: make sure this kind of hostility never, ever persisted on a team.)
I wonder why she didn't record everything - especially since both managers and HR were trying to gaslight her - making her doubt her sanity. If she'd gone to HR with recordings and they brushed aside her concerns then she'd have a much stronger case. Well as she said, a distressed mind doesn't think properly.
If you're trying to make people sympathise with you and support you, pulling out a recording device isn't the first thing you want to do.
What do you suppose she do in this case apart from recording the meeting?
"there was no harassment according to legal definition. " He's extremely lucky. In Canada, and in a growing number of jurisdictions - there is 'harassment' so long as the victim feels as if there was. If a girl feels harassed - then that's it. Guilty. It's a deep breach of our fundamental rights, in that crimes should be determined objectively, and not subject to the whims and feelings of a victim. Obviously, this is…
If that were true, the accused could counterclaim to be harassed by the accuser, and produce a stalemate.
This makes me think it's not true.
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Women, girls and ladies are used interchangeably to refer to females. Grown women will also refer each other girls. To read such a common usage as misogyny is idiotic.
Grown women will also refer each other girls. I've heard a similar argument before, in reference to race. The logic is equally weak when crusty old white bigots use it.
Do you realize that you're being a racist?